In this week’s blog we are shifting our focus to a piece of Montessori equipment – knobless cylinders. We hope this will help give you an insight to the use of this equipment which is part of our sensory range of Montessori materials.

Knobless cylinders are a set of four colours. Each colour is kept in a colour coded box containing 10 cylinders. These correspond to the cylinder blocks 1 to 4, which is another set from our range of sensorial material. The cylinders are handled with the pincer grip and the control of error is visual. The cylinders are used to learn about grading and classification. The grading exercise can be done as a table top activity. They can also be used to build a tower on a floor mat.

The four colours are red, blue, green and blue, each box has a different learning outcome. When a child is working with the red box they are learning about the difference in width. Each red cylinder has the same height but a different width. When working with the blue cylinder box the child is learning to discriminate the different heights. Each blue cylinder has the same width. Each cylinder in the green box has a different height and a different width. The shortest cylinder is the thickest cylinder and the tallest cylinder is the thinnest cylinder. And the yellow box is where all the cylinders again have different heights and widths but with this box it is the shortest cylinder that is the thinnest and the tallest cylinder is the thickest.

Sensorial materials have many learning outcomes. These include:

• To bring order and clarity to the many impressions already absorbed by the children
• To develop concentration
• To develop an awareness of each sense and a widen the field of perception
• To develop coordinated movements
• To promote verbal skills and extended vocabulary
• To promote development of cognitive skills, recognition, association, matching, classifying and grading.

If your child is talking about a particular piece of Montessori equipment which they enjoy, please share this with our Montessori teachers. Perhaps we could focus on your child’s preferred choice in an upcoming blog. Keep us posted!